Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
@afrodita-marcu.bsky.social
240 followers 350 following 23 posts
Social Psychologist, CPsychol AFBPsS, FHEA, doing psychosocial research in cancer at the University of Surrey. Open Research champion. Qualitative methods. Co-production.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
mims.bsky.social
This is a REALLY good video that gets into the *specifics* of how AI is degrading our information environment and putting truth further out of reach for the average person / the population as a whole
bvlsingler.bsky.social
I walked into the lounge last night to find my teenage son watching this. We have long admired @kurzgesagt.org and found their videos to be extremely illuminating. But this one in particular I think is so important right now!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN...
AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel
YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
bobwachter.bsky.social
My new Substack: Will AI Rescue Primary Care?
Why AI-enabled solutions have mostly failed to solve the primary care crisis, and my hope/prediction that the endgame will likely be a new two-tiered system that increasingly relies on AI for basic care needs.
robertwachter.substack.com/p/will-ai-re...
Will AI Rescue Primary Care?
Eventually, But Not Yet
robertwachter.substack.com
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
"Why would OpenAI and Microsoft spend $23 million to give 'free training' on how to use AI to teachers? Because they love teachers? No. Because they want to get their products into public schools in an attempt to cultivate the education market. ... To automate teachers, in other words."
hamiltonnolan.bsky.social
It takes no special technical expertise to know that
1) AI's main value proposition today is automating labor,
2) AI is going to supercharge economic inequality, and
3) If we do not get out in front of that policy-wise, we are fools.

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-o...
Thinking of AI as a Social Problem
No need to know the unknowable. The knowable is bad enough.
www.hamiltonnolan.com
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Scholarslop: The Dangers of an Algorithmic Idea of the University - great piece by @berrydm.bsky.social

"academics will need to find new means to defend the university and contest the use of scholarslop before it is too late" stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...
Scholarslop: The Dangers of an Algorithmic Idea of the University
Understanding digital media, technology, theory, culture and society.
stunlaw.blogspot.com
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
who.int
WHO @who.int · 4d
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

#BreastCancer is the most common cancer among women globally and represents approximately a quarter of all cancers that occur in women every year.
Breast cancer is highly curable if detected in its early stages and adequate treatment is provided.
Pink background with bold text saying 'Let's make breast cancer history' with 'breast cancer' crossed out, World Health Organization logo in corner.
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
theatlantic.com
The AI doomsayers are warning of a bubble, but—at least for now—that doesn't seem to matter to AI’s biggest investors, Will Gottsegen writes in The Atlantic Daily.
The AI Money Vortex
OpenAI is worth $500 billion now. What are its investors getting back?
bit.ly
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
tjheffernan.bsky.social
They really need to be stopped...these Big Tech companies are destroying the planet with the goal of getting people addicted to their money-losing sycophantic chatbots. The AI industry is not the future.
jennycohn.bsky.social
“In a rural Louisiana farming community of 20,000 people, Meta is building a 4-million-square-foot AI data center, even as locals in Georgia grapple with a dwindling and discolored water supply following the construction of a similar facility that began in 2018.” 10/1/25 … 1/
Meta Builds AI Center the Size of 70 Football Fields. Residents Near Similar Facility Say They're 'Scared to Drink Our Own Water'
As Meta builds its largest AI data center in rural Louisiana, residents living near a similar facility in Georgia are having issues with their water supply. The parent company of Instagram has promise...
people.com
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
theatlantic.com
"The human brain is simply not wired to treat AI like any other technology," Webb Wright writes. "For some users, the system is alive."
The Alien Intelligence in Your Pocket
Are you sure that chatbot isn’t alive?
bit.ly
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
capcbristol.bsky.social
Webinar: Evaluating impact in Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE).

Join us for this FREE 90-minute session on the different approaches to evaluating PPIE in health research, led by PPIE experts.

📆Tues 21 Oct 2025, 1-2.30pm

Register: tinyurl.com/5xvmpdmw

@nihrspcr.bsky.social
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“To add insult to injury, many metaphorical … phrases (especially used to describe ANNs; see Table 1) — like train, learn, hallucinate, reason — are applied to machines and result in distorting how we perceive these machines: humanising them while dehumanising us”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

14/🧵
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
If academics & researchers in AI (like myself) don’t want the coming AI winter to destroy our field, we need to be accountable for how we allowed another hype cycle on our watch. We have the expertise to stop it. We need to speak truth to power in our own institutions!
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
theatlantic.com
AI and authoritarianism are “two sides of the same coin,” George Packer argues. “We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel”:
America’s Zombie Democracy
Its trappings remain, but authoritarianism and AI are hollowing out our humanity.
bit.ly
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
mcrcnews.bsky.social
Join us for the next cancer research webinar "Let’s Talk About…Being a Cancer Researcher Affected by Cancer" with Prof. Tim Witney and Prof. Sandra Strauss.

📅Thursday 2nd October 2025
⏰12-1pm
💻Online

Register now: ow.ly/HpYA50WYIYs
Let’s Talk About… Being a cancer researcher affected by cancer
Seminar exploring the challenges of experiencing cancer in a personal capacity and of loved ones while working in cancer research
ow.ly
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
mollyrookwood.bsky.social
Ted Chiang:
"The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write [...]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning."
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
kortizart.bsky.social
And literally four days later from this story Open AI admits what we all know to he true.

That when a model generates bullshit, that’s no flaw, that’s just how it works.

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
Reposted by Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
NEW paper! 💭🖥️

“Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?”

— Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Table 1
Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.